Natalia Trayanova
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine
PhD, FNAI, FHRS, FAHA, FACC, FESC, FEHRA, FIAMBE, FBMES, FAIMBE, FIUPS, FIEEE
Murray B. Sachs Endowed Chair
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine
Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Natalia Trayanova holds the inaugural Murray B. Sachs Professorship in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. She envisioned, created, and directs the Alliance for Cardiovascular Diagnostic and Treatment Innovation (ADVANCE), a research enterprise aimed at bringing innovative engineering and AI approaches to cardiovascular health directly into the clinic. Additionally, she serves as the Director for AI Research in Health and Medicine in the Data Science and AI Institute, where she is responsible for directing efforts across the university in developing and deploying AI applications that advance healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes. She also leads the Computational Cardiology Laboratory.
Dr. Trayanova is internationally recognized as a leader in the development and utilization of clinical-image-based digital twins of patient hearts that faithfully represent the functioning of the patient’s diseased organ. Using her first-of-their-kind personalized heart digital twins and deep learning approaches, she has developed new technologies for accurately predicting the risk of cardiac arrest and for the precise delivery of catheter ablation therapies in patients with heart rhythm disorders. For her pioneering work in computational cardiology, she received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2013. Her research output includes over 450 published papers and book chapters, with publications in prestigious journals such as The Lancet, Nature Cardiovascular Medicine, Nature Communications, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Advances, Science Translational Medicine, Physiological Reviews, Nature Reviews Cardiology, and eLife.
The technological innovations of Dr. Trayanova’s team are ushering in new personalized approaches to heart health. She has developed digital-twin-guided treatment strategies for patients with complex cardiac rhythm disorders. Her seminal papers in Nature Biomedical Engineering in 2018 and 2019 demonstrated, in prospective patient studies, the utility and significant benefit of using personalized digital twins in the interventional management of cardiac arrhythmias. The AI approaches developed by her team are far-reaching and aimed directly at improving patient outcomes and healthcare delivery. She has developed novel multi-modality deep learning approaches to predict personalized risk of sudden cardiac death in patients with different cardiac diseases.
Dr. Trayanova is the inventor on numerous patents and patent applications filed worldwide. In recognition of her innovation, she was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2019. Her work has received worldwide recognition, and she is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. In 2019, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, an honor conferred on only five women each year from around the world. The same year, she received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Heart Rhythm Society. This was followed by the Douglas P. Zipes Lectureship Award by the same society in 2020, and by the Gordon Moe Award by the Cardiac Electrophysiology Society in 2023. In 2024, Dr. Trayanova was named the recipient of the Hodgkin-Huxley-Katz Prize Lecture by The Physiological Society, to be delivered in 2025.
Dr. Trayanova has been named a Fellow of several professional societies, testifying to her impact in clinical practice and biomedical engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS). She has given over 370 invited lectures, the majority of them keynotes or plenary talks. Her work has also received widespread media coverage and recognition, and she has delivered a TEDx talk.
